Live By Intellectual Property, Die By Intellectual Property

from the irony,-anyone? dept

I guess it's really no surprise that a company that makes its living trying to sell software to protect intellectual property would take issues like patents seriously. Still, there's a bit of irony involved in a patent battle over different types of copy protection. Amusingly, the companies aren't saying that one is necessarily violating another's patent -- but that each have patents that "overlap" with each other, and that "there can be only one" patent holder for the idea. Of course, you would think that having two (or more) patents on the same idea might immediately cancel both patents, as it would suggest that neither patent is "non-obvious to the skilled practitioner," as per the requirements on getting a patent. If two patents over the same idea were given out, doesn't that suggest that the skilled practitioners were all making the same (oops!) obvious steps forward? At the same time, you would think that these two companies might realize that they'd probably both be better off sharing the markets and (gasp!) competing on the merits of their offerings -- rather than risk losing out entirely on a market. However, the mindset seems to be that the only way to compete is to have a monopoly on the idea -- and all that really means is that (thanks to less competition) copy protection products will continue to be pretty weak for the foreseeable future.

Not the point

Why the criticism of enforcing a patent so as not to compete on the merits of their offerings? Companies have to devote resources to making patentable advances - and often without success. It does not mean companies cannot compete - they can sell the patent right so the inventor would receive a premium on their invention, while competition takes care of the quality of the product. And even if the industry is worse off as a result, you have to provide an incentive for the real groundbreaking inventions - that's a price worth paying for a bit of inefficiency.

Re: Not the point

Kind of rediculous comment.. how would you like it if you made something and somebody else just duplicated it and sold more of it. I think that statement should be more directed towards IP Patents (I.E. Make everything open source :)